The ‘My Meme Story’ Debacle

As the digital story below (“My Meme Story”) exemplifies perfectly, the large video upload sites (such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) are frequently duped by fraudulent content providers who make bogus claims about copyright violation.

“My Meme Story” makes limited use of a few snippets of material from original content creators and gives credit to all of them. For educational purposes, this is permitted by the “Fair Use” provisions of standard copyright law.

One of the songs is the historically significant “Dragostea din tei” (also known as “Numa Numa“) that was originally recorded by the Moldovan pop group O-Zone in 2003. It enjoyed enormous success on pop music charts all over the world and, as leading anthropologist Michael Wesch pointed out in “An anthropological introduction to YouTube,” it was the song used by Gary Brolsma created his “Numa Numa” lip sync performance and uploaded it to Newgrounds.com. Gary’s dance went viral immediately and, as Dr. Wesch says in the dedication at the end of his presentation, it started the dance of human to human connectivity–now known as social networking. This was in 2004–before YouTube even existed–and it has forever changed our culture.

After the original release by O-Zone, a sleazy Romanian rip-off artist named Paula Mitrache (a.k.a. by the stage name of Haiducii ) recorded an unauthorized cover version of the song, which made her rich and famous, but also resulted in her being “sued by O-Zone for copyright infringement, since she had neither obtained permission from O-Zone to record the single nor given due credit to Dan Bălan for being the original writer of the song.”

Here, now, is the incredible point of this article.

For months after my original upload of “My Meme Story” to YouTube–which includes excerpts of only the O-zone version of the song, it was banned by YouTube in over 200 countries because of a fraudulent copyright infringement claim by the original copyright infringer, Haiducii. Given that she was sued by O-zone for stealing their song, that I used only the O-zone version of the song (because hers has no musical or historical significance), and that my educational videos are good only because I make “fair use” of clear and original examples, I decided that it was now time to post my story to forewarn other content creators and filmmakers about the existence of these digital parasites. Haiducii is not the only one!

Moral of the story: beware of the sleazy con-artists who lurk and commit fraud on YouTube, Vimeo, and similar SNS video upload sites. If you are not 100% vigilant, you and your hard work could become their next victims.

That being said, I am proud to present this self-hosted version of “My Meme Story,” viewable in any country in the world that has uncensored internet access: